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Month in a Minute – April 2012

Well my poor blog has been quite neglected over the last month. What a month it was! I’ve had quite the crazy ride and it was fantastic. Here’s what happened:

Loving – My beautiful new nephew who gets more and more gorgeous each time I see him.

Also loving travel. Love love love it. Had an absolutely fabulous time in Vietnam, watch this space for a bunch of posts about the trip and a showcase of photos that I took.

Reading – Time and Again by Clifford D Simak –As I mentioned before Time Travel is a bit of an obsession right now. This book by the Hugo and Nebula Award winning Simak (that’s how he’s billed on the cover) has a character who has travelled through both time and space. True Sci Fi can be quite mind bending and what is really going on isn’t always readily apparent. That’s the case with this book. I’m about 9/10ths through it and yet I’m still not entirely sure I understand what the story is. I’m hoping for a good finish. Having said that I’ve enjoyed this Bookfair find. That’s great ’cause I bought a bunch more that are just waiting for me to read them.

Listening To –Pretty much nothing because I was so busy. Some random old music but that’s all. Next month will be a different story.

Watching – When our plane got delayed by 5 hours out of Saigon my friend Asha and I killed time watching the first episodes of Touch and Missing on my iPad. Touch is the new Kiefer Sutherland drama which is part Numb3rs, part Heroes and part something else I can’t put my fingers on. It’s interesting this shift to brainy science people being the heroes of things. Kiefer, the king of the small screen, is an interesting actor. He is always Kiefer in everything and yet he is also the character. He is one of the few actors who truly make the jump between villian and hero seamlessly. His father is also a master of this skill. I believe the show is on the knife’s edge for renewal but somehow I think the network will give the show more time to build an audience. It is a Kiefer show afterall.

I put Missing off for a while but getting stranded prompted me to watch it. I love Ashley Judd and it’s nice to see her back, whether it be small or big screen. I enjoyed Missing, it’s full of twists and turns and is like a movie but broken down for the small screen. I do have an issue with it however. While I love Ms Judd and I totally buy her as an ex-CIA operative – she can definitely kick major butt – I had trouble with the portrayal of her character as a weepy mother after her child. I’m not sure how the character was written but Ashley as co-executive producer would have had a lot of input. The problem is that her character was reputedly a cold, emotionless operative, one of the best. Yet for most of the first two episodes she cries at the drop of a hat. An operative would have reflexed back to training focussing on the goal. Yes the sceen where she breaks down in episode 2 was right on the money and packed a great emotional punch but the punch was lessened by the great shows of emotion prior to it. The CIA itself questioned whether she was just a mother looking for her son and they should have played up that question mark by having no great shows of emotion until that pivotal scene in episode 2. It’s a shame it’s unlikely to get renewed because I think it could have gone somewhere but the cost was likely driven up by the overseas locations (at least for some of it) and some big names including Sean Bean, who was grossly under utilised (though I have a sneaky suspicion we havent’ seen the last of him).

Buying – WAY too much stuff. My holiday wasn’t supposed to be a shopping holiday turned into a 2 week spree. I earned quite the bad reputation for shopping on the trip even though these days I don’t actually go shopping much (perhaps that’s why I went crazy). I’ll be doing a separate post on buying tailored clothing overseas.

Looking forward to – Having a quieter month, though it seems to be quite a social month already.